Archive for April, 2006
Thursday, April 20th, 2006
Beaver Overthinking Dam
Hilarious.
No Comments » - Posted in Life by Shane
Thursday, April 13th, 2006
Patents are Like Nuclear Bombs…
… you just got to have some. When I was at Delani — now SwiftK — there was, I thought, an unhealthy obsession with patents. The line was that the only way to get investors was to have patents. VC Fred Wilson weighs in on software patents today. He suggests that the best offense is [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by Shane
Thursday, April 13th, 2006
Blogging and Organizational Communication
I told myself I would never blog about blogging. It’s like watching a movie about the making of a movie. To the outsider, it just seems like self-gratification that you’d rather not watch. In this case, at least you’re not paying for it.
I had a conversation with a colleague today about blogging. This person is [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Uncategorized by Shane
Wednesday, April 12th, 2006
Analytic Functions
I always seem to get this wrong, so please excuse this note to myself.
SELECT gpa,
DENSE_RANK() OVER (PARTITION BY strm, class_nbr ORDER BY gpa DESC) class_rank
No Comments » - Posted in SQL Tricks by Shane
Wednesday, April 12th, 2006
Special SQL Characters
Since the PeopleSoft table naming convention is to use as many underscores as possible, I’ve run into many snafus since the underscore is a special character in SQL. Clark (via Linda) showed us some ways around this.
select count(*)
from dba_tables
where table_name like ‘%\_UM’ escape ‘\’
COUNT(*)
———-
113
1 row [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Oracle, SQL Tricks by Shane
Wednesday, April 12th, 2006
NULL values and NOT EQUALS operator
Some food for thought when working with NULL values.
select count(*)
from ps_dwsa_prog_dtl
COUNT(*)
———-
657662
1 row selected
select count(*)
from ps_dwsa_prog_dtl
where acad_sub_plan =’13′
COUNT(*)
———-
13
1 row selected
select count(*)
from ps_dwsa_prog_dtl
where acad_sub_plan ‘13′
COUNT(*)
———-
148559
1 row selected
select count(*)
from ps_dwsa_prog_dtl
where acad_sub_plan is null
COUNT(*)
———-
[...]
No Comments » - Posted in Oracle, SQL Server, SQL Tricks by Shane
Wednesday, April 12th, 2006
Thunderbird 3.0
I’m running the new nightly build of Thunderbird 3.0. If you are using Thunderbird and don’t have it installed. Consider it for two reasons:
(1) Folder Views: Including Favorite Folders and Unread Folders
I used Favorite Folders all the time in Outlook and have really missed it since the switch. I have so many IMAP folders that [...]